8 ms·
Space roboticist here. As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replac
by GlenTheMachine 1y ago
Space roboticist here.
As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components.
As a first cut, this would require:
- an autonomous rendezvous and docking system
- a fully railed robotic system, e.g. some sort of robotic manipulator that can move along rails and reach every card in every server in the system, which usually means a system of relatively stiff rails running throughout the interior of the plant
- CPU, power, comms, and cooling to support the above
- importantly, the ability of the robotic servicing system toto replace itself. In other words, it would need to be at least two fault tolerant -- which usually means dual wound motors, redundant gears, redundant harness, redundant power, comms, and compute. Alternately, two or more independent robotic systems that are capable of not only replacing cards but also of replacing each other.
- regular launches containing replacement hardware
- ongoing ground support staff to deal with failures
The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
- intended 1y agoIt sounds like building it on the moon would be better.
- spauldo 1y agoDepends what you want to use it for. Ping time to the moon and back is about 2.5 seconds best case.
- hamburglar 1y agoSeems prudent to achieve fully robotic datacenters on earth before doing it in space. I know, I’m a real wet blanket.
- Robotbeat 1y agoIf mass is going to be as cheap as is needed for this to work anyway, there's no reason you can't just use people like in a normal datacenter.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- littlestymaar 1y agoSpace is very bad for the human body, you wouldn't be able to leave the humans there waiting for something to happen like you do on earth, they'd need to be sent from earth every time. Also, making something suitable for humans means having lots of empty space where the human can walk around (or float around, rather, since we're talking about space).
- switknee 1y agoUnderwater welder, though being replaced by drone operator, is still a trade despite the health risks. Do you think nobody on this whole planet would take a space datacenter job on a 3 month rotation? I agree that it may be best to avoid needing the space and facilities for a human being in the satellite. Fire and forget. Launch it further into space instead of back to earth for a decommission. People can salvage the materials later.
- littlestymaar 1y agoThe problem isn't health “risk”, there are risks but there are also health effects that will come with certainty. For instance, low gravity deplete your muscles pretty fast. Spend three month in space and you're not going to walk out of the reentry vehicle. This effect can be somehow overcome by exercising while in space but it's not perfect even with the insane amount of medical monitoring the guys up there receive.
- Robotbeat 1y ago
- protocolture 1y agoDid Microsoft do any of that with their submersible tests? My feeling is that, a bit like starlink, you would just deprecate failed hardware, rather than bother with all the moving parts to replace faulty ram. Does mean your comms and OOB tools need to be better than the average american colo provider but I would hope that would be a given.
- protocolture 1y ago>The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation. And once you remove all the moving parts, you just fill the whole thing with oil rather than air and let heat transfer more smoothly to the radiators.
- sagarm 1y agoDoes using oil solve the mass problem? Liquids aren't light.
- protocolture 1y agoI would wager that its lighter than: Repair robots Enough air between servers to allow robots to access and replace componentry. Spare componentry. An eject/return system. Heatpipes from every server to the radiators.
- junon 1y agoI would wager it isn't.
- spauldo 1y agoA light oil has a density of 700kg per cubic meter. Most common oils are denser. Then you'd need vanes, agitators, and pumps to keep the oil moving around without forming eddies. These would need to be fairly bulky compared to fans and fan motors. I'd have to see what an engineering team came up with, but at first glance the liquid solution would be much heavier and likely more maintenance intensive.
- oceanplexian 1y agoWhy does it need to be robots? On Earth we have skeleton crews maintain large datacenters. If the cost of mass to orbit is 100x cheaper, it’s not that absurd to have an on-call rotation of humans to maintain the space datacenter and install parts shipped on space FedEx or whatever we have in the future.
- monster_truck 1y agoThat isn't going to last for much longer with the way power density projections are looking. Consider that we've been at the point where layers of monitoring & lockout systems are required to ensure no humans get caught in hot spots, which can surpass 100C, for quite some time now.
- Robotbeat 1y agoYou mean like every single kitchen?
- dweinus 1y agoYou might be thinking of 100F, a toasty summer day. 100C on the other hand (about 212F) is fatal even in zero humidity.
- globalise83 1y agoWell, after a while. A decently hot Finnish sauna...
- monster_truck 1y agoNo, I mean like you crumple to the ground and cook to death if there isn't someone close enough to grab you within a few minutes. 212F ambient air. Like the inside of a meat smoker, but big enough for humans. DC's aren't quite there yet, but the hot spots that do occur are enough to cause arc flashes which claim hundreds of lives a year.
- Robotbeat 1y ago
- monster_truck 1y agoI suspect they'd stop at automatic rendezvous & docking. Use some sort of cradle system that holds heat fins, power, etc that boxes of racks would slot into. Once they fail just pop em out and let em burn up. Someone else will figure out the landing bit I won't say it's a good idea, but it's a fun way to get rid of e-waste (I envision this as a sort of old persons home for parted out supercomptuers)
- closewith 1y agoSpreading heavy metals in the upper atmosphere. Fun.
- garbagewoman 1y agoseems to be an industry standard
- monster_truck 1y agoSeems like a bit of pointless whataboutism when we're still using leaded fuel in planes and helicopters
- closewith 1y agoAt least that's relatively local pollution and isn't raining down on me given it's banned in the entire EU.
- monster_truck 1y agoHave you looked at the number of exemptions issued after they sunset it? Virtually nothing has changed.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoAppreciate the insights, but I think failing hardware is the least of their problems. In that underwater pod trial, MS saw lower failure rates than expected (nitrogen atmosphere could be a key factor there). > The company only lost six of the 855 submerged servers versus the eight servers that needed replacement (from the total of 135) on the parallel experiment Microsoft ran on land. It equates to a 0.7% loss in the sea versus 5.9% on land. 6/855 servers over 6 years is nothing. You'd simply re-launch the whole thing in 6 years (with advances in hardware anyways) and you'd call it a day. Just route around the bad servers. Add a bit more redundancy in your scheme. Plan for 10% to fail. That being said, it's a complete bonkers proposal until they figure out the big problems, like cooling, power, and so on.
- nine_k 1y agoIndeed, MS had it easier with a huge, readily available cooling reservoir and a layer of water that additionally protects (a little) against cosmic rays, plus the whole thing had to be heavy enough to sink. An orbital datacenter would be in a opposite situation: all cooling is radiative, many more high-energy particles, and the weight should be as light as possible.
- looofooo0 1y agoPower!? Isnt that just PV and batteries? LEO has like 1.5h orbit.
- literalAardvark 1y agoIt's a Datacenter... I guess solar is what they're planning to use, but the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity well
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- vidarh 1y agoI've had actual, real-life deployments in datacentres where we just left dead hardware in the racks until we needed the space, and we rarely did. Typically we'd visit a couple of times a year, because it was cheap to do so, but it'd have totally viable to let failures accumulate over a much longer time horizon. Failure rates tend to follow a bathtub curve, so if you burn-in the hardware before launch, you'd expect low failure rates for a long period and it's quite likely it'd be cheaper to not replace components and just ensure enough redundancy for key systems (power, cooling, networking) that you could just shut down and disable any dead servers, and then replace the whole unit when enough parts have failed.
- rajnathani 1y agoExactly what I was thinking when the OP comment brought up "regular launches containing replacement hardware", this is easily solvable by actually "treating servers as cattle and not pets" whereby one would simply over-provision servers and then simply replace faulty servers around once per year. Side: Thanks for sharing about the "bathtub curve", as TIL and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before especially as it's related to reliability engineering (as from searching on HN (Algolia) that no HN post about the bathtub curve crossed 9 points).
- btown 1y agohttps://accendoreliability.com/the-bath-tub-curve-explained/ https://accendoreliability.com/the-bath-tub-curve-explained/ is an interesting breakdown of bath tub curve dynamics for those curious!
- Spooky23 1y agoDon’t you need to look at different failure scenarios or patterns in orbit due to exposure to cosmic rays as well? It just seems funny, I recall when servers started getting more energy dense it was a revelation to many computer folks that safe operating temps in a datacenter should be quite high. I’d imagine operating in space has lots of revelations in store. It’s a fascinating idea with big potential impact… but I wouldn’t expect this investment to pay out!
- lumost 1y agoI used to build and operate data center infrastructure. There is very limited reason to do anything more than a warranty replacement on a GPU. With a high quality hardware vendor that properly engineers the physical machine, failure rates can be contained to less than .5% per year. Particularly if the network has redundancy to avoid critical mass failures. In this case, I see no reason to perform any replacements of any kind. Proper networked serial port and power controls would allow maintenance for firmware/software issues.
- empath75 1y agoI think what you actually do is let it gradually degrade over time and then launch a new one.
- callamdelaney 1y agoWhat, why would you fly out and replace it? It'd be much cheaper just to launch more.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- spullara 1y agoyou don't replace it, you just let it fail and over time the datacenter wears out.
- RecycledEle 1y agoWhat if we just integrate the hardware so it fails softly? That is, as hardware fails, the system looses capacity. That seems easier than replacing things on orbit, especially if StarShip becomes the cheapest way to launch to orbit because StarShip launches huge payloads, not a few rack mounted servers.
- markemer 1y agoNot to mention radiation hardening. The soft error rate alone on these single digit nm chips would be massive.
- angadh 1y agoThanks for the thorough comment—yes, the heat pipes etc haven’t been accounted for. Might be a future addition but the idea was to look at some key large parts and see where that takes us in terms of launch. The pipes would definitely skew the business case further. Similarly, the analysis is missing trusses. Don’t even get me started on the costs of maintenance. I am sweating bricks just thinking of the mission architecture for assembly and how the robotic system might actually look. Unless there’s a single 4 km long deployable array (of what width?), which would be ridiculous to imagine.